star formation

The Horsehead Nebula

Telescope class:

Partner Telescopes

Site:

Sedgwick

Telescope:

Sedgwick Reserve Observatory

Instruments:

SBIG STL-6303

A close-up view of the Horsehead Nebula from Sedgwick. The Horsehead Nebula is a stellar nursery ~1500 light years distant near the belt of Orion. I think it is easy to see how this object got its name.

Tags:

Sequential Star Formation in a Cometary Globule (BRC37) of IC1396

We have carried out near-IR/optical observations to examine star formation toward a bright-rimmed cometary globule (BRC37) facing the exciting star(s) of an H II region (IC1396) containing an IRAS source, which is considered to be an intermediate-mass protostar. With slitless spectroscopy we detected ten Hα emission stars around the globule, six of which are near the tip of the globule and are aligned along the direction to the exciting stars. There is evidence that this alignment was originally toward an O9.5 star, but has evolved to align toward a younger O6 star when that formed.

The Astronomical Journal, Volume 135, Issue 6, pp. 2323-2335 (2008)

Angular Momentum Study of Pre-main-sequence Stars

The aim of this project is determining the angular momentum history of Pre Main Sequence (PMS) stars in young clusters. Assuming a conservation of angular momentum, as these stars contract during formation, they should all be rotating rapidly after a very short amount of time (~2 Myrs). However, rotation periods of young cluster members show that most of these stars rotate much more slowly than expected. For many years, the precise mechanism which prevents these stars from spinning up has been debated, with no conclusive observational evidence to support one mechanism over another.